Appointed Rounds: Essays - Softcover

Michael McFee (author)

3.8

5 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0881466387 ISBN 13: 9780881466386

Publisher: Mercer University Press, 2018

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Michael McFee's new book takes its title from the unofficial motto of the US Postal Service: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." All of us have appointed rounds in our lives-essential things we are given to do and must try to complete, whatever the inner or outer weather, whenever the time of day or night, however we may approach those duties. This lively and wide-ranging collection of fifty essays-many of them pointed, a page or so, in the playful manner of Robert Francis and The Satirical Rogue on Poetry, and others rolling on for much longer-addresses McFee's appointed rounds, subjects he has been thinking and caring about for decades: books, his native Western North Carolina mountains, writing, reading, editing, teaching, and, as the title suggests, the daily mail. It includes pieces on "My Inner Hillbilly" and Appalachia, on "Authors' Photos" and "Blurbs" and other parts of the physical book, on "My New Yorker" and contemporary literary culture, on "Poets as Novelists" and "Marginalia" and being a writer, on a teacher's "Gradebook" and "The Blackboard," and on authorial matters like "Voice," "Audience," and "Immortality." The prose explorations in Appointed Rounds, like McFee's poems, are meant as appreciations, paying close attention to things that have mattered to him (and many others), savoring their details while exploring their larger design, and saving his versions of them even as they may change or fade or disappear altogether.

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About the Author:

Michael McFee has published fifteen books--eleven volumes of poetry, most recently We Were Once Here (Carnegie Mellon, 2017); one collection of prose, The Napkin Manuscripts (Tennessee, 2006); and several anthologies, including The Language They Speak is Things to Eat (UNC Press, 1994). He received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. A native of Asheville, North Carolina, he is professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at UNC-Chapel Hill.

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